Tuesday night was bad for Democrats, good for the GOP establishment and great for incumbents of both parties.

Going into the latest round of primaries, top Republicans feared that Sen. Thad Cochran would fall in Mississippi, immigration hard-liner Tom Tancredo could win their gubernatorial nomination in Colorado and GOP Rep. Richard Hanna would lose a primary in New York because he had endorsed gay marriage.

Such a scenario would have kept one of the country’s reddest states on the map of competitive Senate races through the fall and badly damaged the Republican’s Senate challenger in Colorado — not to mention spurred days of negative coverage presenting the tea party as ascendent and the GOP as intolerant.

But the Republican nightmare didn’t happen: Cochran and Hanna won, Tancredo lost and Rep. James Lankford trounced his Ted Cruz-backed rival in an Oklahoma Senate primary, avoiding a widely expected runoff.

With that in mind, here are takeaways from Tuesday night:

Mississippi is off the map.

The Magnolia State would have joined Kentucky and Georgia as a potential pickup opportunity for Democrats in a year when they are mostly focused on defending incumbents in red states.

A win by the 41-year-old McDaniel would have created at least a narrow opening for Democratic candidate Travis Childers, a moderate former congressman. Now Cochran is expected to coast to a seventh term.

That means millions of dollars that might have been spent to get McDaniel across the finish line in November can now be invested in races that will decide control of the Senate.

Eric Cantor looks like an outlier.

The House majority leader’s loss in Virginia two weeks ago seems more like an exception in a year that’s otherwise gone well for the establishment.

Incumbents everywhere did well. Even Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel looks poised to win his Democratic primary and with it a 23rd term, despite a changing district and a credible challenge from a state senator who almost toppled him two years ago.

“The one thing that everyone can agree on tonight: The Cantor loss now looks even more embarrassing for Cantor,” tweeted Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee executive director Guy Cecil.

Bigger picture, for the first time since 2008, every Republican senator now looks likely to win his primary this year. In Kansas on Aug. 5, Sen. Pat Roberts is heavily favored over physician Milton Wolf, who has been on the defensive over patient X-rays he posted on Facebook. And on Aug. 7 in Tennessee, Sen. Lamar Alexander looks safe against state Rep. Joe Carr.

The results are a major blow to conservative outside groups who talked a big game about holding incumbents accountable, whether in Kentucky, Texas or South Carolina.

In Mississippi alone, Club for Growth Action spent $3.1 million and Senate Conservatives Action Fund spent $1.3 million boosting McDaniel.

In Colorado, Democratic meddling did not work.

The Republican establishment breathed a sigh of relief as former Rep. Bob Beauprez won a four-way GOP primary over Tancredo.

Tancredo, also a former congressman, ran for president in 2008 and then, as a third-party candidate, for governor in 2010. An independent group funded by the Democratic Governors Association and others on the left spent a quarter-million dollars on ads, many of which seemed designed to promote Tancredo in the primary by calling him “too conservative for Colorado.”

The fear among top Republicans was that Tancredo’s hard-line positions on a host of hot button issues, especially immigration, would gin up Democratic base turnout in November. This would hurt their star Senate recruit, Rep. Cory Gardner, who is locked in a tight race with Democratic Sen. Mark Udall.

Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper is still favored to beat Beauprez, who lost by 17 percentage points when he was the GOP nominee for governor in 2006. But the race could certainly tighten if 2014 turns into a wave election.

The GOP gets its candidates in New York.

In the state’s 22nd Congressional District, Republican Hanna held off a spirited primary challenge from Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney, who attacked him over his support for gay marriage. She had the backing of several big social conservative groups, and Rick Santorum recorded a last-minute robocall on her behalf.

In the 21st District, where Democrat Bill Owens is retiring, GOP operative Elise Stefanik crushed Matt Doheny, a self-funder who lost to Owns the past two cycles. Stefanik, who helped write the Republican platform and prepared Paul Ryan for his vice presidential debate in 2012, received $800,000 in outside help from American Crossroads and benefited from a Mitt Romney endorsement. The 29-year-old is now favored to win the seat this fall.

In the 1st District, on Long Island, state Sen. Lee Zeldin handily beat former Wall Street prosecutor George Demos, who lost in the 2010 GOP primary. Zeldin had the backing of the U.S. Chamber, the American Action Network and the US Jobs Council, which overcame Demos’ self-funding advantage. Zeldin now faces perennially vulnerable Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop.

In Oklahoma, the Baptists were more organized than the tribes.

Two-term Rep. James Lankford crushed T.W. Shannon — the former speaker of the state House who was backed by tea party hero Ted Cruz — and avoided a runoff in the special election to succeed the retiring Tom Coburn.

Before being elected to the House in 2010, the 46-year-old Lankford ran the biggest Baptist summer camp in the state. This helped him build an extensive network among the religious right, and they mobilized for him across the state.

Shannon is both an African-American and a member of the Chickasaw Nation, whose gambling interests make it a major, deep-pocketed player in Oklahoma politics. But the Baptists were far more energized than the tribes, and Lankford far outperformed polls that showed him with a slight lead but below the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

No surprise, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown cruised to an easy victory. He won with more than twice as many votes as Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler and Heather Mizeur, an openly gay state delegate, at the end of a particularly nasty primary.

Brown, an African-American veteran, faces only token GOP opposition this November to succeed the outgoing O’Malley, who is gearing up for a 2016 presidential campaign.

The governor was just in Iowa over the weekend and then flew back to campaign with Brown ahead of the primary. Their administration took heat over the disastrous rollout of an Obamacare exchange and their push to raise taxes during the past eight years, but Brown’s win is undoubtedly helpful for O’Malley.

“Anthony and I have worked together to raise Maryland’s minimum wage, pass marriage equality, expand opportunity by enacting the Maryland DREAM Act, and pass common sense gun safety legislation,” O’Malley said in an email to supporters just after the race was called.